Campus Cops Try To Fill Role As Cyber Superheroes

Minority students here at the University of Iowa's College of Dentistry received a series of threatening
e-mail messages last March warning them to "be afraid, not only for their future careers but for their lives.
"If firearms need to be used. Then they will," said the message, which also
threatened to blow up the dentistry college building.
Authorities later arrested Tarsha Claiborne, 23, a second-year dental student at Iowa who is African American. Her
attorneys, who contend Claiborne was under tremendous pressure in part because the university has so few African American students, say she'll use a diminished-responsibility defense at her September trial.
The story of how University of Iowa campus police managed to apprehend Claiborne in less than a month with nothing more to go on than a few electronic copies of the anonymous computer message serves as a parable for how irrevocably police work has altered in what some are calling the cyber century.
"Combating cyber crime is something that every campus police department will have to be aware of and have to earmark some
resources toward," says Charles D. Green, director of public safety for the 28,000-student university. "We cannot just ignore it. It's only going to increase."
Dennis Shaw, chairman of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators' technology committee, says it's clear that cyber crime is on the rise. "All you have to do is look at the number of e-mail viruses and those sort of things," says Shaw.
Since the beginning of the year, colleges and universities from California to Connecticut have dealt with a rash of computer-
related crimes ranging from computer pornography to serious security breaches. For example:
n  A student at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, was charged with five counts of felony communications fraud in March after being accused of rigging an online election so he could win the race for student body president.
Andrew Shafer won the online election with 756 votes, but when university officials became suspicious and ordered a second, manual vote, he received just 63 votes. Authorities later confiscated several computers from which hundreds of votes were sent.
n A Colorado State University graduate student was arrested in May after the FBI
accused him of trying to extort money, a car and free downloads from a New Jersey Internet company that sells digital books. The
student allegedly sent threatening e-mail messages.
n Hackers tapped into computers at the University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford University and the University of California at Santa Barbara in February to help orchestrate a series of attacks that temporarily crippled several popular commercial Internet sites, including Yahoo!, eBay, E*TRADE and CNN.com.
Authorities say the attacks probably didn't originate on those campuses. They think hackers infiltrated their systems remotely. The computers were used to bombard the Web sites with so many data requests that the sites eventually overloaded.